Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLoghttp://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news.html
Claudio's day to day2016 Claudio Saavedraclaudio@codemonkey.clclaudio@codemonkey.clenThu, 15 Dec 2016 19:15:49 +0200Thu 2016/Dec/15http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2016-12.html#D15
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2016-12.html#D15Thu, 15 Dec 2016 19:13:00 +0200Igalia is
hiring. We're currently interested in Multimedia
and Chromium
developers. Check the announcements for details on the
positions and our company.
]]>Mon 2016/Feb/08http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2016-02.html#D08
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2016-02.html#D08Mon, 08 Feb 2016 11:01:00 +0200
About a year ago, Igalia was approached by the people
working on printing-related technologies in HP to see
whether we could give them a hand in their ongoing effort
to improve the printing experience in the web. They had
been working for a while in extensions for popular web
browsers that would allow users, for example, to distill a
web page from cruft and ads and format its relevant
contents in a way that would be pleasant to read in
print. While these extensions were working fine, they were
interested in exploring the possibility of adding this
feature to popular browsers, so that users wouldn't need
to be bothered with installing extensions to have an
improved printing experience.

That's how Alex, Martin, and me spent a few months
exploring the Chromium project and its printing
architecture. Soon enough we found out that the Chromium
developers had been working already on a feature that
would allow pages to be removed from cruft and presented
in a sort of reader mode, at least in mobile
versions of the browser. This is achieved through a
module called dom
distiller, which basically has the ability to traverse
the DOM tree of a web page and return a clean DOM tree
with only the important contents of the page. This module
is based on the algorithms and heuristics in a project
called boilerpipe with some of it also coming from the now
popular Readability. Our goal, then, was to integrate the
DOM distiller with the modules in Chromium that take care
of generating the document that is then sent to both the
print preview and the printing service, as well as making
this feature available in the printing UI.

After a couple of months of work and thanks to the kind
code reviews of the folks at Google, we got the feature
landed in Chromium's repository. For a while, though, it
remained hidden behind a runtime flag, as the Chromium
team needed to make sure that things would work well
enough in all fronts before making it available to all
users. Fast-forward to last week, when I found out by
chance that the runtime flag has been flipped and the
Simplify page printing option has been available
in Chromium and Chrome for a while now, and it has even
reached the stable releases. The reader mode
feature in Chromium seems to remain hidden behind a
runtime flag, I think, which is interesting considering
that this was the original motivation behind the dom
distiller.

As a side note, it is worth mentioning that the
collaboration with HP was pretty neat and it's a good
example of the ways in which Igalia can help organizations
to improve the web experience of users. From the standards
that define the web to the browsers that people use in
their everyday life, there are plenty of areas in which
work needs to be done to make the web a more pleasant
place, for web developers and users alike. If your
organization relies on the web to reach its users, or to
enable them to make use of your technologies, chances are
that there are areas in which their experience can be
improved and that's one of the things we love doing.

]]>Thu 2016/Feb/04http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2016-02.html#D04
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2016-02.html#D04Thu, 04 Feb 2016 14:53:00 +0200
We've opened a
few positions for developers in the fields of
multimedia, networking, and compilers. I could say a
lot about why working in Igalia is way different
to working on your average tech-company or start-up, but
I think the way it's summarized in the announcements is
pretty good. Have a look at them if you are curious and
don't hesitate to apply!

]]>Fri 2015/Jul/10http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2015-07.html#D10
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2015-07.html#D10Fri, 10 Jul 2015 10:26:00 +0300
It's summer! That means that, if you are a student,
you could be one of our summer interns in Igalia this
season. We have two positions available: the first
related to WebKit work and the second to web
development. Both positions can be filled in either of
our locations in Galicia or you can work remotely from
wherever you prefer (plenty of us work remotely, so
you'll have to communicate with some of us via jabber
and email anyway).

Have a look at the announcement
in our web page for more details, and don't hesitate
to contact me if you have any doubt about the
internships!

]]>Tue 2015/Apr/28http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2015-04.html#D28
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2015-04.html#D28Tue, 28 Apr 2015 11:04:00 +0300
A follow up to my last post. As I was writing it, someone
was packaging Linux 4.0 for Debian. I fetched it from the
experimental distribution today and all what was broken
with the X1 Carbon now works (that is, the bluetooth
keyboard, trackpad button events, and 3G/4G USB modem
networking). The WEP128 authentication still doesn't work
but you shouldn't be using it anyway because aircrack and
so on and so on.

]]>Tue 2015/Apr/21http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2015-04.html#D21
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2015-04.html#D21Tue, 21 Apr 2015 10:10:00 +0300
Igalia got me a Lenovo X1 Carbon, third generation. I
decided to install Debian on it without really considering
that the imminent release of Debian Jessie would get in
the way. After a few weeks of tinkering, these are a few
notes on what works (with a little help) and what doesn't
(yet).

What works (with a little help):

Graphics acceleration: Initially X was using llvmpipe
and software rasterization. This laptop has Intel
Broadwell graphics and the support for it has not been
without issues recently. I installed
libdrm-intel1,
xserver-xorg-video-intel, and the 3.19 kernel
from experimental, and that fixed it.

I also got a OneLink Pro Dock, which I use to connect
to two external displays to the laptop. For whatever
reason, these were not detected properly with Jessie's
3.16 kernel. Upgrading to 3.19 fixed this too. I
should have used the preinstalled Windows to upgrade
its firmware, by the way, but by the time I realized,
the Windows partitions were long gone.

But upgrading to 3.19 broke both wireless and
bluetooth, as with this kernel version newer binary
firmware blobs are needed. These are not yet packaged
in Debian, but until then you can fetch them from the
web. The files needed are
ibt-hw-37.8.10-fw-1.10.3.11.e.bseq for
bluetooth and iwlwifi-7265-12.ucode for the
wireless. There is a bug about it in the Debian
bugtracker somewhere.

Intel's Rapid Start Technology. Just follow Matthew
Garrett's advice and create a large enough
partition with the appropriate type.

What doesn't work yet:

My Bluetooth keyboard. There are disconnects at
random intervals that make it pretty much useless. This
is reported in the Debian bugtracker but there have
not been any responses yet. I packaged the latest BlueZ
release and installed it locally, but that didn't really
help, so I'm guessing that the issue is in the
kernel. It is possible that my package is broken,
though, as I had to rebase some Debian patches and
remove others. As a side note, I had forgotten how nice
quilt can be for this.

The trackpad buttons. Some people suggest switching
the driver but then Synaptics won't work. So there's
that. I think that the 4.0 kernel has the fixes
needed, but last I checked there was no package yet
and I don't feel like compiling a kernel. Compiling
browsers the whole day is already enough for me, so
I'll wait.

Using a Nokia N9 as a USB mobile broadband modem or
the integrated Sierra 4G modem. The former works in my
Fedora laptop, and in Debian both seem to be
detected correctly, but
journalctl reports some oddities, like:

I upgraded to experimental's ModemManager, without
any improvement. Haven't yet figured out what could this
be, although I only used NetworkManager to try to connect.

The (terrible) WEP128 authentication in the Nokia N9
wireless hotspot application. As neither the USB modem
nor the 4G one are working yet, using the wireless
hotspot is the only alternative for the afternoons
outside my home office. Not sure why it won't connect
(again, only tested with NetworkManager), but at this
point I'm starting to be more pragmatic about being
able to use this laptop at all. Leaving the hotspot
open was the only alternative. I know.

I know I should be a good citizen and add at least some of
this information to ThinkWiki, but hey, at least I wrote
it down somewhere.

I've started doing two exciting things lately. The
first one is Ashtanga yoga. I had been wanting to try
yoga for a long time now, as swimming and running have
been pretty good for me but at the same time have made
my muscles pretty stiff. Yoga seemed like the obvious
choice, so after much tought and hesitation I started
visiting the local Ashtanga Yoga school. After a month
I'm starting to get somewhere (i.e. my toes) and I'm
pretty much addicted to it.

The second thing is that I started playing the
keyboards yesterday. I used to toy around with
keyboards when I was a kid but I never really learned
anything meaningful, so when I saw an ad for a
second-hand WK-1200, I couldn't resist and got
it. After an evening of practice I already got the
feel of Cohen's Samson
in New Orleans and the first 16 bars of Verdi's
Va, pensiero, but I'm still horribly bad at
playing with both hands.

]]>Thu 2014/Oct/16http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2014-10.html#D16
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2014-10.html#D16Thu, 16 Oct 2014 14:49:00 +0300
My first memories of Meritähti are
from that first weekend, in late August 2008, when I
had just arrived in Helsinki to spend what was supposed
to be only a couple of months doing GTK+ and Hildon
work for Nokia. Lucas, who was still in Finland at
the time, had recommended that I check the program for
the Night of the Arts, an evening that serves as the
closing of the summer season in the Helsinki region and
consists of several dozens of street stages set up all
over with all kind of performances. It sounded
interesting, and I was looking forward to check the
evening vibe out.

I was at the Ruoholahti office that Friday, when Kimmo
came over to my desk to invite me to join his mates
for dinner. Having the Night of the Arts in mind, I
suggested we grab some food downtown before finding an
interesting act somewhere, to which he replied
emphatically "No! We first go to Meritähti to
eat, a place nearby — it's our Friday tradition
here." Surprised at the tenacity of his objection
and being the new kid in town, I obliged. I can't
remember now who else joined us in that summer evening
before we headed to the Night of the Arts, probably
Jörgen, Marius, and others, but that would be the
first of many more to come in the future.

I started taking part of that tradition and I always
thought, somehow, that those Meritähti evenings would
continue for a long time. Because even after the whole
Hildon team was dismantled, even after many of the
people in our gang left Nokia and others moved on to
work on the now also defunct MeeGo, we still met in
Meritähti once in a while for food, a couple of beers,
and good laughs. Even after Nokia closed down the
Ruoholahti NRC, even after everyone I knew had left
the company, even after the company was sold out, and
even after half the people we knew had left the
country, we still met there for a good old
super-special.

But those evenings were not bound to be eternal, and
like most good things in life, they are coming to an
end. Meritähti is closing in the next weeks,
and the handful of renegades who stuck in Helsinki
will have to find a new place where to spend our
evenings together. László, the friendly Hungarian who
ran the place with his family, is moving on to less
stressful endeavors. Keeping a bar is too much work,
he told us, and everyone has the right to one day say
enough. One would want to do or say something
to change his mind, but what right do we have? We
should instead be glad that the place was there for us
and that we had the chance to enjoy uncountable
evenings under the starfish lamps that gave the place
its name. If we're feeling melancholic, we will always
have Kaurismäki's Lights in the dusk and that
glorious scene
involving a dog in the cold, to remember one of those
many times when conflict would ensue whenever a
careless dog-owner would stop for a pint in the
winter.

Long live Meritähti, long live László, and
köszönöm!

]]>Sun 2014/Sep/14http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2014-09.html#D14
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2014-09.html#D14Sun, 14 Sep 2014 18:52:00 +0300
You can try to disguise it in any way you want, but at
the end of the day what we have is a boys' club that
suddenly cannot invest all of its money into toys for
the boys' amusement but now also needs to spend it
leveling the field for the girls to be able to play
too. Less money for the toys the boys like, surely
that upsets them -- after all, boys were having so
much fun so far and now that fun is being taken away.

The fact that the fun in this case happens to be
of a socially necessary technological nature (a free
desktop, a free software stack, whatever you want to call
it) doesn't make this any different. If you are objecting
to OPW and your argument is that it hinders the
technological advance of the GNOME project, well, admit it
-- isn't the fact that you enjoy technology at heart (ie,
you are the one having fun) one of the main reasons
you're saying this?

Male-chauvinism can take a thousand forms, and many of
those forms are so well hidden and ingrained into our
culture that they are terribly difficult to see, specially
if you're a man and not the target of it. Once we are
confronted with any of these forms, this might even give
us a terrible headache -- we are in front of something we
didn't even know it existed -- and it can take a
tremendous effort to accept they're here. But, frankly,
that effort is long due and many of us will refuse to be
around those not wanting to make it.

]]>Sat 2014/May/24http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2014-05.html#D24
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2014-05.html#D24Sat, 24 May 2014 02:44:00 +0300
I am a GNOME developer and I do not share Philip Van
Hoof's views. He doesn't represent me.
]]>Fri 2014/Apr/11http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2014-04.html#D11
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2014-04.html#D11Fri, 11 Apr 2014 14:35:00 +0300Igalia
has opened internship positions for students,
to work in tasks around WebKitGTK+. This is a great opportunity for you to
become acquaintance with the WebKit project, GNOME,
their communities, and also to learn about our company.

Many Igalians started their journey in the company by
doing an internship during their study years and
eventually came back to join us full-time, so if you
are interested to join us at some point but are still
in the middle of your studies, this is a great
opportunity to get us to know you and have a wonderful
summer.

]]>Sun 2013/Dec/08http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-12.html#D08
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-12.html#D08Sun, 08 Dec 2013 13:48:00 +0200
And here we are, victims of our love and commitment
with the web, GNOME, and WebKit, gathered in the most
beautiful city of A Coruña, for what is the
fifth edition of the always productive and joyful
WebKitGTK+ hackfest.

This year the crowd has reached the unprecedent number
of 30 people, which makes it for the largest hackfest
to date. Not everyone has arrived yet, but day one has
already seen some fruitful discussions on what should
be tackled, and I hear that tortillas and tapas are on
the way. Since I am a gossiper, I will advance you
that it is very likely that we will see progress
towards multiple web processes in WebKitGTK+/GNOME Web
and even a network process; as well as pretty neat
improvements to the UI of our cherished browser; and
very possibly many more things of which I hope my dear
hackmates will write about.

Given that I don't intend to allow an extensive
account of the happenings in northern Galicia to
become a distraction to what should actually be an
extensive and exhaustive patch review session, I will
instead close this post by thanking the GNOME
Foundation and Igalia for making, once again, this
hackfest possible. For further updates, stay tuned
to Planet
GNOME and the @WebKitGTK twitter
account.
]]>

Sat 2013/Oct/05http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-10.html#D05
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-10.html#D05Sat, 05 Oct 2013 11:16:00 +0300
I have been putting off this post for long enough now and
perhaps the internet has already written about this,
nonetheless, I feel my duty to share with you my
excitement about the latest release of GNOME Web, which,
once again, we can proudly say it's the best release we've
achieved so far. Let's see in detail why.

First of all, let's remember the evolution that Web, once
Epiphany, has gone through since the second WebKitGTK+
hackfest in the Igalia offices, back in 2011. Back then, Jon,
Bastien, Felipe, Xan and I sat together for an afternoon
discussing the role that Epiphany would have in GNOME in
the long-run, and how could we evolve, from what we had
back then to what the design team had envisioned for the
browser up to that point, in a way that would adjust to
the six-month release cycle in GNOME, so that our users
could already get, iteratively, the improvements we would
be working on.

Since then, every single release of Epiphany, now Web, has
brought to you changes that have spurred a bit of
controversy, but in the long run, have pleased our users
and also brought about new ones, proving that the
iterative nature of our work has been working out well.
With the 3.10 release, however, we've settled a bit the
pace of the work and we've focused mostly in polishing and
ironing out the details that, for diverse reasons, we had
left pending. Work, as usual, is never complete, but I am
happy with what we've done for the current release.

Another aspect of this release that's worth mentioning is
that many of the cool changes coming with it are the work
from contributors to the project other than the usual
suspects, and it's been with pleasure that I have probably
spent more time reviewing patches for Web than writing my
own. It is pretty cool to see other people as motivated
with Web as we are.

But now to the juice. What's new in Web 3.10?

DuckDuckGo as new default search engine:I have already written
about this in a previous entry, but slightly over a
month into the news, I can say that the reaction so far
has been mixed, though mostly positive. We still need to
see Web hitting the release of major distributions in
order to judge better the reception, and I am looking
forward to it.

New titlebar for normal and application
mode: Following the designs from Allan and the
rest of the design team, Yosef Or Boczko took on the
challenge to rewrite the titlebar to use a style close to
that of the new GtkHeaderBar, both for normal windows and
for the application mode. The result is pretty awesome.

Normal window

Application mode

While we're not yet using GtkHeaderBar, due to
some limitations that make it unsuitable for Web, we will
try to solve this during the 3.12 cycle.

New search provider for GNOME Shell: This
is a really cool feature. Have you noticed that when
typing in the shell overview, not only applications come
up as suggestion, but also files in your Home directory
and, perhaps, even some other results? Wouldn't it be
awesome if also results from your Web search history would
come up? Or if you had the chance to perform a internet
search right from the shell? Well, this is no longer a
dream. Thanks to Giovanni Campagna, Web now ships a
search provider for the Shell, which will take
care of providing results for you. Click on the Web icon,
next to the search history results, and a Web window will
come up with fresh search results.

Results from Web's history in the GNOME Shell

The way this works is that Web now can run in a headless
mode, so that whenever the shell requests results from
Web's provider, this will query results from a running
instance of Web. If Web is not running, a headless
instance can be spawned. Eventually, we might want to
split this to a separate binary to avoid the need for a
headless browser and have a minimal search daemon instead,
but that's still under discussion.

Form authentication revamped: Gustavo
took on the task of fighting the DOM bindings and the web
extension in order to bring our users something that was
long due: the possibility of not only storing but also
accessing form credentials for multiple usernames in the
same site. Now, every time you try to log in a webform
for which you've stored more than one username/password
pair, a nice popup with autocompletion will show up, to
help you select the right credentials.

Multiple usernames in Twitter

Favicons in the overview thumbnails: This
is a small change but one that improves considerably
discoverability in the overview. Judge by yourself.

Overview thumbnails with favicons

An improved WebKit2 engine: I'll
keep this short and won't go into details, but thanks to the
latest version of WebKitGTK+, you'll have a new Web Inspector,
accelerated video compositing support, and a much more stable
and mature engine. Carlos
has written extensively about the WebKitGTK+ 2.2 release. Please go and read his post
if you haven't already.

A new user manual: Even before we started
rewriting Web's user interface, the user manual shipped
with it was already obsolete, so our decision had been to
remove it entirely. Thanks to the fantastic work of the
documentation team, Web 3.10 is the first version in a
long while to ship a user
manual updated to the latest features.

Of course, there are a good deal of other fixes and minor
improvements that it would be pointless to list
here in detail. Please give GNOME Web a try and see by yourself. If
you have feedback, rest assured that we're eagerly waiting
for it, and that we expect you'll enjoy browsing the web
with us as much as we've enjoyed the last six months of work.

]]>Tue 2013/Aug/27http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-08.html#D27
http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-08.html#D27Tue, 27 Aug 2013 15:03:00 +0300
Today, we have switched the default search engine in Web from Google to DuckDuckGo. This change
might come up as a surprise, but there are a handful of
reasons why this actually makes sense:

Cooperation: It's been some time now since we
were first contacted by DuckDuckGo regarding the
possibility to partner with them in order to share a
percentage of the revenue that they make from the
traffic originated on their search engine links,
should DuckDuckGo become Web's default search
engine. We discussed this possibility extensively,
among the Web maintainers, within Igalia, and with the
GNOME Foundation Board. In the end we all agreed that
Igalia was the most suitable partner for this
cooperation due to its commitment not only to
advancing WebKitGTK+ and Web, but also to enabling the
community through events like its yearly WebKitGTK+
hackfest. We believe that whatever revenue that might
result from this partnership with DuckDuckGo will
surely be a contribution to these efforts. Then again,
knowing the humble size of our userbase, we should let
neither our expectations nor our imagination run wild
on this front.

It works: as this is something that we've
been debating for pretty long, I've spent this time
using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine on my
own machines, and I am happy with the results it
gives. It even has pretty handy keywords that you can
use to directly search in Wikipedia (!w), Amazon (!a),
or even Google if you still need it (!g). I do believe
the Spanish translation of the website could use some
love, but their community
platform is probably a good starting place for
anyone interested in contributing with more and
improved translations.

As is usually the case with noticeable changes, I expect
that not everyone will be entirely happy with it. But that
is no reason to panic:

This partnership is for a limited time, and we will
evaluate whether its continuation makes sense, in the
long-term. The feedback we receive from our users
will naturally have an impact on whatever decision we
make in this regard.

The slides for my Web
talk, generated from the pinpoint sources, are
available here.

I'm delighted with the relevance that students have
gained inside the project and all the effort the
community puts into integrating them. It is hard not
to see GNOME and GUADEC nowadays as a platform to
bring young people into free software, this being an
effort that can only bring positive results in the
long run. This, in itself, is motivation enough for me
to be part of this wonderful community — I only
wish more Chilean students would be encouraged to
participate in GSoC and OPW.

Kat
and other enthusiastic contributors have been working
hard rewriting the documentation for Web. I have
reviewed it and I'm very happy with it. We were badly
needing documentation so I can only be grateful for
their persistence and patience, specially when it
comes down to chasing me around the venue despite my
hiding.

Despite all the years past and how much effort we've
put into making it clear who is who, people continue
to confuse Garnacho
and me. I am close to giving up on the subject and
start impersonating him next time someone mixes us up.
I need to work on my madrileño accent,
though.

I can't believe Federico
thought Condorito is
Colombian. Something is really wrong with the
world.

I am also going to GUADEC this year. I
think it's my eighth time already and I suspect
there will be many more to come despite the constant
and recurrent fatalism that surrounds a project that
has
been proclaimed dead once and again, ever since
its inception and with each of its uncountable
reawakenings.

I will be talking about Web, our beloved browser, in a
talk whose title is so vague and sensationalist as we
often love to title things in order to get attention
— Web:
the future is now. Don't expect anything so juicy
— as usual with sensationalism, the title is
greater than the work itself.

Last but definitely not least, I'm proud to say that Igalia is not only
making my trip possible but also sponsoring the
conference. Find us, Igalians, hanging around and
don't hesitate to stop us to talk about anything
— let it be technology, our organization, or
your uncontainable desire to be one of us.

Since I'm back to the vice of my teens, literature,
I've decided to give this brief visit to Brno a
literary taste. Robert
Musil, giant of modernism, was an engineer as
yours truly and used to lecture at the Technical
University of Brno. Word has it that there is a commemorative
plaque to his memory hidden somewhere in one of
the campi of the University and my plan is to find
it. Any hints that could lead to this piece of
nostalgia will be greatly appreciated.

Afterwards I'll spend a couple of days hanging around
in Prague where I plan to just wonder around, think
about Kafka, and read his
diaries, before jumping on a train to the good old
Dresden where friends and Kästner's
house await. I might even read his
diaries as well.

Oh the WebKits! During the past few weeks, thanks to
Igalia's
collaboration with the good folks
at Bloomberg,
I have descended from the heights of Epiphany and
WebKitGTK+ to the depths
of WebCore,
that obscure but cleverly assembled part of WebKit
that magnificently takes care of the logic inherent to
layouting, rendering, and the inner representation of
HTML documents. A fascinating aspect of WebCore is
that its architecture, completely decoupled from the
actual implementation in the different WebKit ports,
means that any change to its parts will affect all
ports and browsers built upon this marvelous piece of
engineering. Let me assure you, dear reader, the
challenges this implies are comparable only to the joy
it brings to this humble hacker, as the following will
reveal!

Among the many duties of WebCore lies controlling the
logic behind user interaction with HTML documents
— something that has changed considerably in
recent years. While originally, most interactive
editing in the web was limited to plain and boring web
forms, in this brave new world of ours it is also
possible to build complete HTML editors using nothing
but HTML and JavaScript access to the DOM. Have you
seen Wordpress' fantastic editor? Then you shall agree
with me that this is an extremely powerful feature.

But with great power comes great responsibility, as
the old saying goes. And with great responsibility
come bugs, says a more recent variation of the same
maxim. And where bugs are to be found, relentless
minds work tirelessly in order to ensure that your
browsing experience never ceases to improve. This is
one of the goals that Igalia, humbly but boldly,
pursues with utmost seriousness. And so it has been
that I, your humble servant, have spent countless
hours mastering my way through the DOM and editing
features of WebCore. Bugs have been fixed
already — some
affecting editing
in Windows, others
affecting editing
in GNU/Linux, and others
affecting all
platforms equally. More will be fixed in the
forthcoming weeks. I can only attempt to share my
excitement through these words, for I am unable to
express it in a way that would do it justice.

As a side note, I am a committer to the WebKit project
for a little while now. This is pretty cool, as it
means I get a direct chance to break your browser. Or
unbreak it, shall it be the case. I try to lean
towards the latter but trust me, it is not an easy
task!

The WebKitGTK+
hackfest has been ongoing for the last three days
in the Igalia
offices in the not-that-rainy city of A Coruña.
We're over twenty people here and we've been hacking,
discussing, and ranting over whatnot -- all to make
sure that your browsing experience in the forthcoming
years will be better than it has ever been. Here's a
brief summary of what's been going on hitherto:

There is, of course, much more going on and it's hard
to keep track of the activity of these brave and energetic
hackers. Yours truly has had a hard time distracting them
from their relentless hacking in order to compile this report -- rest
assured that there is probably much more happening between these
four walls than what you have just read here. Nevertheless,
we all want to thank the GNOME Foundation and all the sponsors
who have made this gathering possible.

Igalia is looking
for a Free Software enthusiast living in the San
Francisco Bay Area to work with us in the role of
Sales Engineer. If you're reading this,
chances are that I don't need to tell you who we
are, what we do,
how we do
it, and what our core values
are, nevertheless, if you want to know more, please
read the job
opening in our webpage.

If you have specific inquiries don't hesitate to contact any of
us through the usual channels!

On Friday I landed into Epiphany
master the first iteration of a new feature that us
the Igalia webkit
hackers and the GNOME design team have
been collaborating on for a while. We codename this
feature the overview but, in its first
iteration, you can think more of it as a speed dial
for new pages, that will allow you to quickly jump to
the pages you frequent more often when opening a new
tab or window.

This will certainly be the most prominent new feature
of Epiphany in GNOME 3.6, and we believe you'll love
it. Personally, I think that this is a huge usability
improvement, but I'm much more excited about the
possibilities this brings from here on. For 3.8, our
plans are more ambitious, but I guess that we will
talk more about it when the time is due.